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How do you write yourself a happy ending?
Endings take time, take patience, take and take and take to twist and make something special. Endings take effort, and take thought, and creating the specific idea of a happy ending is altogether different from the one you can end up on.
John has read stories, watched movies, thought up his own worlds of make-believe and happiness all around from his childhood. John has learned since then, though, that he never quite knew the meaning of ‘happiness’, and especially not since it came to a story. A story about how the hero does something cool and always ends up winning was especially ripe, considering John has known about happiness but never quite knew what happiness was, having been a child so cared for and protected for he never had to question his stale state of it.
There is the question, after all, of if you would know what happiness was if there existed no pain.
But people get older and the world grows bigger, in a terrifying way, and the list of questions grows longer. Skaia above them shines in victory, the dust of rubble subsides, and fuschia blood proves Roxy as the victor above the slain monster. Rose is letting a pained smile show to a wary Kanaya, as the blood drips from John’s nose, and the fight for existence is over, and the clear answer to all of John’s questions is nowhere to be seen.
He looks up towards Skaia, expecting to know something. To learn something. Skaia is silent, omnipresent and unspeaking, and there is no grace of some form of god to speak into John’s head like a movie actor’s inner monologue.
Roxy is cheering, but John doesn’t taste victory in her speech. All he can taste is blood and confusion.
Writing towards a goal is hard. Creation, somehow, seems simpler. There is no end goal to creation, unless it is to just create, and John cannot describe the feeling of being a god and having created life alongside his friends.
John has never had any strong opinions about religion, about God. But perhaps, he thinks, God must have been just a little bit lonely in his story to have created a universe all by himself. John pities that idea, somehow, that there was no one in God’s story to point out little unseen mishaps like the way Jade does, or banter around the layout of a galaxy like Dave and Dirk do, or think about the smaller issues in significant ways like Karkat does. Kanaya puts together sketches of what’s to come beautifully and Terezi just snickers, snickers in that way that leaves a little worry and nervousness for whatever she has planned for the universe, but John wouldn’t have it any other way. When Rose comes to him with ideas she and Kanaya have come up with, a sparkle shining brilliantly in her eye, John cannot think of any other way.
No, no, John does not understand how creation could ever be done alone. John gifts the worlds that appear calm and pretty from afar rivers and oceans and the brisk brush of winds, and when his friends smile with something none of them could ever create on their own, John understands creation was never meant to be something done alone at all.
There was something special about creating a universe for you and your friends to live in. There just had to be, John thought, because nothing else he ever felt compared to it.
But creation only lasted for so long. When the stars were spread and the worlds were created and life could breathe in for the first time, there was simply nothing else to do but live in what they made as their masterpiece. If they made a mistake or accidentally overlooked something, there was nothing in the rules that said they couldn’t fix it (and there was nothing more powerful than them to tell them otherwise). John was still hesitant, though, as they finally stood on their new home, as he watched the horizon grow ruby and gold with the first sunrise. He told himself that he wanted to be focused on the other thousand things they had to worry about, but his mind refused to latch onto anything and swore to remain empty. He couldn’t think about anything else when he treaded through the soft grass underneath his shoes, thinking about their new future, and thinking about how they would remake the definition of home.
But John was stuck a bit on how the sun rose so similarly to all his memories of before. It didn’t look quite as different, he realized, and perhaps that meant something about the way he could live his life. Many things had changed, but at the end of the day, Jade still smiled, Dave still cracked bad jokes, and Rose liked to think she knew about everything.
And John - could he be blamed if he wanted to live in his perfectly unchanged childhood home, watch the same great (horrible) movies every Saturday, pretend that the absence of his father was due to the preparation of a trick rather than what the burn in his heart really said?
Rose looked at him worriedly when he was the first to suggest living in their old homes.
He was John, though, so of course all his friends would believe John was just being very simple-minded about his suggestion.
Jade and Roxy at least agreed with him when he said it. John could’ve sworn Jade looked almost guilty, though, in the way she glanced at him when she said it, and Roxy didn’t seem like she was paying any mind to the idea of her home but rather tugging insistently and excitedly on Callie’s arm with hyper whispers about the future.
Was he being weird when he asked it? He didn’t think so. He didn’t do anything besides suggest an idea that warranted the hesitant tone in some of his friend’s voices.
And if he did, he would swear he didn’t know what.
In the end, they actually ended up only placing John’s old home in a place where the grass flowed like water and the air felt like comfort. John likes it, and doesn’t mind having all of his friends stay in his house for just that night, to just rest after all of the work they did, and felt pretty complacent about his place in his life right then.
He feels pretty differently about it the next morning, though, when he wakes up to his friends leaving, seemingly excited to start the next day and build their own homes, start the creation of their own lives, and he is left by himself in a house too empty for all the memories it contains within.
There is nothing else for him to create, except new memories, and he doesn’t quite know how he feels about doing that.
His problem occurs soon after that.
Living with new people creates new drama. No one wants to be alone, but no one wants to be alone in a house full of friends either. The trolls voice their concern about living with multiple people in such a small area, but Kanaya still tugs on Rose's sleeves and Terezi just smirks. The concerns and issues grow from trolls to humans to something hybrid, and in the end John's friends end up causing more problems than they had when they started.
John offers the very empty rooms of his house as a middle ground, but everyone is almost avoidant of it. Or of him. At this point, he can't tell very much. Roxy has started growing distant from him for Callie (not that he blames her, her life is very much her choice, Callie is nice and sweet and John doesn't think he'd ever be brave enough to make a choice like Roxy does-) and his closest friends are as antagonistic as always. Jade is starting to look away from him more and more often, Rose is looking at him too often, and Dave-
Well, Dave is sort of the only one who he thinks gets closest enough.
"Y'know, dude, it's just-" Dave had motioned unhelpfully. "It'd make sense if it felt like too much. Doesn't it feel like too much? I personally would rate it a 47 out of 6 for how much it is."
And John sighed because they were playing Mario Kart, and he was somehow still losing, and he had no idea how the hell this conversation came out of Mario Kart.
"I like it," John had replied. "It's nice, it's cool! We won, and we get to be rich and do stupid stuff and live forever, if we want to, and it feels exactly kinda like how we were supposed to end up like in the first place."
"Really?" Dave asked, because if anyone had asked him, he'd place in his very large doubts about the fact any of them were supposed to end up as god-like figures with reality-bending powers, witnessing the things they did and doing the things destined for them through some twisted fate, and somehow manage to be teenagers at the same time.
And John hesitated then, because he was lying to himself, and he knew it.
"Yeah," John lied, passing Dave in Mario Kart, his eyes avoiding the picture frames he didn't have the heart to take off the walls.
But that talk on that casual day playing video games must’ve done something, because Jade stopped being so distant and Rose stopped looking at him like he might do something destructively impulsive. He felt like a fraud, then, but he had missed his friends, and his friends had missed who he had been while he had been gone (had been dead, apparently-)
But he starts to wonder, at the end of the day, just how much storybooks omitted from the hungry readers. He wonders about how heroes must feel, at the end of the day, when they got home tired and hurting and sore but only on the inside. He wonders how heroes feel about living to see the ending, how they live at night thinking about tomorrow and how daunting it feels to have to see another sunrise and think about what they might do that day. Stories, John thinks a bit bitterly, never included how directionless and unsure the hero felt after succeeding, after living past The End , how stories never included the bits about having all the choices and never knowing which one was the right one after the villain was defeated. Because if the villain was defeated, that just had to have been the right choice the hero had made- right?
Were there ever any others?
Existence is a little hard, John thinks one night, staring at his ceiling in the blurry darkness, tired but wide awake. Existence is a little much, all at once.
Maybe that’s what Dave had meant.
John falls asleep, and John wakes up in the morning, but he doesn’t move from his bed for hours, because he feels like he already knows he’s going to end up nowhere at all.
He still gets himself a sandwich in the mid-afternoon, though, because he may be directionless, but he doesn’t have to be directionless and hungry.
The end of the story, John believes, was probably when they won the game. That’s where Rose’s journal of their events end, handed off to the waiting population they had made, and it’s where the new world’s history books about them end, and it’s where the habitants of their new world’s thoughts end, and it’s where their Wiki-page ends. He doesn’t think it’s some form of narcissism when he scrolls through how their story is written, how he reads and remembers each and every event he was a part of (he was there he had been there why did he feel like an outsider?), how empty he feels when he gets to the end of “their” story every time. The ending of it, John always reads, always goes something along the lines of “and now they live the rest of their lives happily on Earth C. ” but John, for some reason, cannot bring himself to fully believe it. That line feels wrong to him, for some reason, in a way that hurts. It feels incomplete, almost mockingly offending, and he, for the life of him, cannot figure out why.
His friends’ problems are that they cannot figure out who they want to live with and where - his- his is- he doesn’t even have any problems.
He shouldn’t.
He doesn’t.
He feels like he does.
...does he?
John Egbert lives in his childhood home and watches movies all day. John Egbert is surrounded by his friends, who happen to be gods, and listens to them bicker about small issues and turn them into larger ones. John Egbert is, supposedly, so very fucking happy-
John Egbert wants to run away. From everything. From himself.
He feels like he’s going to, he’s nearly about to.
But the running is plagued with questions about where he could be going, and the whole point of the running is so that he doesn’t have to think about that.
He nearly loses it when a few of his friends ask his opinion about where they should live, not understanding why he cannot tell them anything.
John Egbert is surrounded by everything in existence, yet, he feels so very removed from everything and so very, very-
“-alone.”
Problems stay like cluttered thoughts. Everyone, theoretically, has a place to live now, but now no one can decide to compromise on how to live together in a home, and John’s starting to become irritated at everyone’s pettiness.
Dave and Jade, apparently, are the worst to adjust to, and throw in a Terezi whose main goal is to strictly seed a bit of chaos, Karkat has decided that John, as the outlier in everything, is the one person to give him the least amount of garbage for his decision.
Karkat’s words. Not John’s.
John has to blink, because Karkat looked so sad saying it, despite how much he was talking about how it affected him and how he hated the problems, and John sort of wants to prod deeper about whatever the whole thing between all of them is making Karkat look so sad but John is not that much of an idiot to believe it’s something Karkat wants to willingly talk about.
“Are you sure?” He supplies, because someone will eventually ask Karkat that, and John’s not sure anyone else will do it as non-bullshitty.
And Karkat frowns, the universal Karkat signal that displays how much he’s fed up with someone.
But John ignores him, and continues. “Seems kinda lonely, to be honest.”
“That’s the point,” Karkat sighs. “The meteor was bigger and I could generally be alone, but the house Dave chose is just not fit for three people, much less two humans and two trolls.” He tapped the cup John offered him when he got there, the drink very much untouched and cold. “...plus, it’s sort of weird.”
“It’s not weird,” John snorts, regretting his ability to not think ahead before he speaks. Karkat’s eyes are on him in patience. “Just, ah, too many people! It would probably be better if it was just you and someone else.”
“And who, exactly,” Karkat asked. “Would be willing and un-awkward to live with?”
And they’re both silent for a second, quiet in genuine thinking.
John gets to an answer faster, though, and goes, “Uh, I guess, me?”
He’s never wanted to punch himself any harder than then. Regret hits him immediately; not because he’s asking Karkat to live with him, but because he’s truly an idiot for not considering Karkat might not want to live with him.
And not because there’s the possibility he might stop believing he’s alone. He can’t just depend on his friends to always help him, always save him, that’s how he almost lost them-
Karkat just stares at him, for a long while, before going, “You’re fucking kidding me.”
John smiles, just as caught off guard, and goes, “No, not really!”
He’s almost afraid he’s too insistent. It’s not like John’s really his only option. Really, it’s not as if Karkat can’t just live with someone else, someone they don’t know, or as if he can’t just live somewhere else on his own like he planned before John just had to blurt out his suggestion.
“Shut up, you’re thinking too loud.”
Karkat’s grip on the cup is loud, too, because Karkat’s whole thing is about being loud in a lot of ways that don’t matter, and a lot of ways that do.
And John’s grateful for that, really. Who wouldn’t be?
When Karkat leaves, he tells John not to sleep in and he might need to borrow his car (the keys are in a bowl beside the door, dusty) and John just rolls his eyes. Karkat yells obscenities at him before finally leaving, and the air in John’s house is shifted.
Or maybe that’s the dust.
John spends the rest of the night cleaning anything untouched and filled with bittersweet memories, and he will not notice the face Karkat makes the next day when he realizes that John and John’s house, for once, does not look like misery.
The wedding comes many months after. Kanaya chooses Jade at her side, and Rose chooses Roxy. Dave is trusted to hold the rings, which he freaks out about many times before it all starts. Everything goes beautifully and Rose shoves cake in Kanaya’s face and they only panic about the lollipop Callie brings for forty minutes after it wears off.
And John is really- super happy for Rose! It’s the happiest he’s seen her, really, dancing and laughing and looking like she knows what she wants in her life, which what she wants stands by her side looking just as happy in her wedding dress and keeps annoying both Terezi and Karkat because it’s her wedding day, and dammit if Kanaya can’t annoy her friends with her happiness (they wouldn’t ever be annoyed by her happiness but they won’t ever admit it). John smiles when he’s supposed to and laughs when he thinks it’s a great opportunity for it, and the pictures turn out bright and bubbly and- full of someone John doesn’t know. He tries really hard not to think about it, though, because it’s Rose’s day and she deserves her friends to be happy for her, not to be cathartic and lost.
But Rose is smart, and he should’ve known better. He’s sitting on a bench pretending to drink his cider happily, but he knows he’s fucked up when Rose takes a seat next to him, watching Kanaya and Roxy interact in a very odd dance-off on the dance floor.
“You’re not very happy,” Rose says, and John sighs, letting his act slip only slightly.
“I’m happy for you,” he tries, with a smile, and Rose gives her own smile although it just conveys she thinks he’s full of shit.
“But not happy,” Rose continues, her eyes watching over her friends, taking in many sights and glad for the one she has. “And I wonder how long this has gone unnoticed for.”
John shakes his head. “It’s not your fault. It’s not your job to take care of me. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be with Kanaya and being blissfully oblivious to everything else.”
Rose gives a huff, almost a laugh, and John feels glad just to be able to give her a smile when he couldn’t give her his personal happiness.
It was her wedding day. Why was it that he just felt so bare of emotions?
He looks out to his friends, the few that know how to actually dance and the rest that really don’t. He feels weirded out by the fact he doesn’t know how to dance very well, and his memories go back to school and their hosted yearly dances. He never really went to those either, not having many friends that would enjoy going with him, and not having the confidence to dance in front of his peers.
It’s sad, perhaps, that years later he still doesn’t have the faith in himself to dance even around those who wouldn’t judge him for not being able to.
John looks at Kanaya, and he shakes his head, going, “I don’t think I’d be able to do it.”
Rose just raises her eyebrow, asking, “What, exactly?”
Everything, John thinks, but instead he says, “Marriage.”
Rose goes quiet, which makes John believe he’s really surprised her. He’s surprised himself, considering his kid fantasies used to involve saving the world, falling in love with a girl, getting married, and living the rest of his life happily ever after.
He’s achieved only one of these things, and he cannot even take credit all to himself. He would argue against it, to be honest, because he is John Egbert, and John Egbert doesn’t have much faith in himself.
“John, it-” Rose begins. “You realize marriage is only a celebration, right? It’s not at all about the party or cake. It’s about the love.”
It’s about the love, but John cannot even extend his fainting happiness for Rose and Kanaya.
John looks down almost ashamed, murmuring, “I’d feel like a phony.”
Perhaps Rose realizes it’s something deeper going on, or perhaps she just doesn’t understand at all. But Rose places her hand on John’s back, and tells him, “John, I don’t think you’d ever fake having love. And I don’t think you have to have it all now.”
“It’s not-”
“It takes time,” Rose interrupts him. “And maybe it takes something more. Don’t punish yourself over it. Over this.”
He didn’t have to think about what he was capable of when he was a child. He didn’t have to think about fearing love when he got it unconditionally from his father. He didn’t use to have to think about happiness, and he never thought about the pain of its emptiness.
But John can see Kanaya is beginning to slow down, looking around for Rose, and John does not wish to ever stop his friend’s happiness.
John stands up, and Rose follows blindly, not expecting for him to go, “Rose, I think you should stop worrying about me, and go dance with Kanaya. I’ll be fine!”
His plan works, because Kanaya takes her wife in excitement to go dance with her on the dance floor. John sees in Rose’s eyes that she is half-conflicted to stay and solve the problem put in her hands like putty, and ecstatically longing to follow her wife and go.
John doesn’t let her choose, and he feels a bit smug about it. He doesn’t know why he gains a certain energy to keep his friends from worrying about him, but he’s grateful it makes him strong enough to push them towards where they need to go. He stands with a smile on the sidelines, watching all his friends be happy, and feels a bit at peace.
He’s less smug when Rose sends Karkat after him, dragging him by his arm, words sharp but grip soft. He glares at her, but Kanaya has a smirk on her face too, and making his friends stay happy is both a goal and a kryptonite used against him when Karkat asks him to dance.
Dreams tend to not be important to John. Considering most of his life he’s had nightmares, he likes to think he’s completely disregarded anything about the subconscious life at all.
But some dreams were hard to push away, when he got them at all. Some would linger in his head, far past the time he would be sleeping to receive them, and it would make him think. He didn’t really have these types of dreams until he played the game, and though the nightmares have become rarer, the type of dreams to be persistent in his mind did not become more common.
Jade was the one to care about dreams. Not him. Not for any purpose.
But it is the most recent dream he has that makes him believe he should stop believing in make-believe and start believing the serious way Jade talked about her dreams.
The dream never starts out too bad. The dream starts out fun, actually, in different ways that John used to wish to have the type of fun with the friends that weren’t physically present. It can be something like playing at a park, where somehow he and his friends are somehow their younger selves and they’ve figured out a way to travel to one another and the single afternoon replaces all his childhood loneliness. Sometimes, it will be something fantastical like if they are part of some other world and the worries of the future are only mundane and easy, slaying dragons and saving people and adventuring the world. Sometimes it’s something like an afternoon talk, or something like a night spent stargazing when the stars were unreachable. There are times where the dreams hold all of John’s friends, or times where they only hold the friends closer to him like Jade and Rose and Dave, or sometimes they hold only a single person like Karkat.
But the dream does not last long in this stage. Eventually, to John’s dismay, the dream begins to change. Sometimes, it is slow, but sometimes, it is fast and dizzying and takes John off guard as the world around him changes. His friends change from his friends to something plastic, almost something fake, as if they were pieces on a chessboard or actors in a script. The world melts away, content in its torture of John’s mind, and John will start to realize that everything is placed on a chessboard. John never hears the players, but he hears the way they beckon him to make a move, to take a step in a direction, and John knows for some reason that the step he takes will have major consequences.
And the last thing the dream does, before it ends, is let John take a step. He will take a step, and then he will wake up in the middle of the night, or he will wake up in the morning, or he will wake up to Karkat complaining at his door about deciding something for lunch.
He will wake up, and he will feel immense dread. He doesn’t feel stuck, but he feels imprisoned. Real life does not have the air fill with the condescending voices his dream does, but John feels like it should, because he feels the same fear and caution nonetheless.
Dreams have never quite been important. But John feels as if this one does.
John contemplates telling Rose about his dream. He decides against it, in favor of telling Jade.
He doesn’t know why, but he feels like Jade would be the safer option, the one to protect him more from whatever vulnerability his dreams display.
He should’ve known he’d actually be wrong, all things considered.
“Fake???” Jade asks him, balancing herself carefully and with concern over the plant she is tending to. “I don’t know, John, I don’t feel very fake!”
“I don’t think it’s literal, Jade,” John says exasperated. “I know you guys aren’t fake.”
Jade is quiet for a moment, finishing watering the lower planets, watching the waterdrops all land perfectly in her fauna’s pots.
“Well, you’re not really acting like it,” Jade says, almost like a slap to the face, as she floats a little to reach her taller plants. She’s tall, but her cared-for greens are taller.
John blinks a little, taken aback by how much bite there was to Jade’s tone than bark.
“Wha- but I know you guys aren’t- Jade, do you really think I-”
“I don’t think anything about it, John,” Jade interrupts him, unwilling to hear it, as she shoves the empty container for him to fill back up. “You’re telling me about what you think this dream means, and then you’re surprised when I tell you that you’ve been acting like this for a while. I mean, seriously, are you that lost in yourself that you believe everything important is just done and over with?” Jade points the water bucket accusingly towards John, accidentally spilling water on him. “Take the reality check, John, because guess what! Saving the world is over, and so is the adventure. It’s time to start new ones! Are you that upset about ending a journey to never start a new one?”
And John blinks, blinks the argument as the words settle lightly into his head, and the only thing he can come back with is, “I’m not upset.”
“I dunno,” Jade goes with a smile, brushing the tall fauna carefully, with love. “You’re acting like a sad baby.”
“I’m not a sad baby-”
“You are!!” Jade says louder over him, floating above, almost brushing her ears on the panes of the greenhouse. “I love you very much, John, and I am telling you the truth. You are acting like a very sad baby, a very very sad baby who maybe needs to stop thinking about whether or not everything matters and make a choice that matters to yourself.”
And John goes quiet again, for longer this time, and Jade’s ears twitch only in slight satisfaction at the result. She has waited for a very long time for John to catch up. She can wait for longer, but she won’t endorse the sad acts he puts himself in at all.
She’s done with all of that from other people and herself, preferably.
“...a-a sad baby? I think you’ve been hanging out with Dave too much.”
Jade giggles. “I’ve just gotten very used to deciphering guys bullshit.”
John snorts, and this time, a comfortable silence falls over the two of them.
Jade still glances over at her brother, though. There has been progress, she’s seen, especially since John came out of his house and went to her about this. But progress, Jade knows, isn’t easy, and sometimes it’s easier to take a few steps back before continuing the better steps forward.
Walking was because of gravity, after all, and not everyone was lucky to defy it.
Jade decides she’s done with the tough love and puts down her water container, before floating over to John unsuspectingly. He’s been watering the same plant for six minutes, but Jade doesn’t mind all that much because he stops when she puts her head on his shoulder and gives him a hug from behind.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” Jade says, very gently, “And it is okay to not know what to do. But if you let it stop you from living your life, John, then what is it worth living for?”
John is very lucky to have this advice from Jade, she thinks. Like a lot of things, Jade had to learn about this on her own.
“I just don’t know what to do, Jade,” John admits very carefully. Jade’s heart squeezes, because she remembers when she thought the same thing and she could only imagine how John could be feeling right then. “I don’t know what to do. And I don’t know where to start.”
Jade is quiet, for some heavy, thoughtful moments, before she words her answer very carefully.
“I bet some of our friends could help you with that,” Jade suggests, her glasses imprinting into her face but her ignoring it. “Karkat lives with you, right? I’m sure that loudmouth could have an idea or two you could bounce off of.”
John’s silence is hesitant, because he isn’t sure, but Jade is. She knows, because she’s awesome, but also because of what Karkat’s told her. Karkat has been venting about his worry for John for months, and she knows his heart would be delighted to finally have an opportunity to help his friend.
Jade knows Karkat wouldn’t stop trying until he did.
Jade feels John nod shortly, and Jade hums her approval. “See? I told you. I think you’re gonna be just fine!”
And when John laughs this time, she knows it's genuine. She knows, because John isn’t looking around or at her as if he needs approval to laugh. His eyes are closed, and he’s taking in strong breaths, and he is laughing for no one but himself.
When John leaves for home, he looks nearly hopeful. Even if this doesn’t solve all the problems her brother has made for himself, Jade is very certain that John will finally be taking a few steps forward.
And even if not, at least he will be moving. That was the most important part; whatever steps he took, she’d be proud, because he at the very least was moving.
Writing yourself a bit of a happy ending was a lie, John now believes, because life doesn’t exactly end until it does. Stories don’t end, he thinks, until it is chosen they do.
But stories were not just about the endings. Stories were about the beginnings, and the middles, and the endings, and everything in between. Stories were about everything and nothing, and stories were there to exist as lessons or journeys or as a symbol of hope or a coping lack thereof. Stories were meant, John knew, for creation, and they were meant for ending.
Stories only ended if, and how you wanted them to end. Writing stories was as unpredictable as life, because writing a story could turn out the way you wished it to, or it wouldn’t. You never knew until the story was written.
And there could be stories within stories; tales within tales. A story ending did not mean the whole story was ending, and the victory of John and his friends were only the first ending of many.
All stories had endings. But there was so much in between it’s beginning arc, and its end. So much to fill, so much to do. Not all stories were journeys.
Not all journeys had easy endings.
Sometimes it is hard to continue the story, as well as maintain it. John still finds himself laying in his bed at night, staring at his ceiling in the dark. Sometimes he still has dreams that have no meanings, and dreams that do. Sometimes he still feels stuck, trapped in some invisible force, and he is not quite sure he will ever be quite free of that feeling.
But the stories continue, and John is led to believe Jade wholeheartedly; he is beginning to grow sick of standing still. John might not contain the same childhood dreams he held as a child, but no one ever stopped to tell him he wasn’t allowed to have any more similarly fun ones.
He thinks his dad would be proud of him, if he told him that. He thinks his dad would have been proud of him no matter what he was going through, but he believes that his dad would be relieved to know John could still continue his own story, even if his dad was some chapters in the past. The notes John kept tucked in his pocket, tucked in a fading wallet, stored all the proof he’d ever need.
Creating your ending, creating your story, it is hard. Not always, but just sometimes.
Karkat corners him in the house one afternoon, nervous but determined, and asks John on a date.
And John’s never done that before. His heart races in a bit of sputtering clutter and he’s nervous nervous nervous but he says yes, before he can think about it and worry about it and stutter and make a million problems in his head that don’t need to be complicated at all, he says yes and Karkat- Karkat looks relieved. Happy. Concerned. John feels the same.
His story doesn’t stop there, it really doesn’t. The world doesn’t stop moving and the air doesn’t stop dancing and the sun still sets and rises the next day. John thinks about Karkat all that day and thinks about him all night, too, later, after the date, thinks about Karkat and how the world spins and how stories write endings.
How do you write yourself a happy ending?
You don’t.
John falls asleep, and when he wakes up tomorrow he will think about the new day.